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A Study of Christina Rossetti's Poems on Death

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A Study of Christina Rossetti's Poems on Death No/ A STUDY OF CHRISTINA ROSSETTI'S POEMS ON DEATH THESIS Presented to the Graduate Council of the University of North Texas in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS By Okhee J. Yang, B.A., Denton, Texas May, 1992 Yang, Okhee J., A Study of Christina Rossetti's Poems on Death. Master of Arts (English), May, 1992, 81 pp., endnotes, bibliography, 39 titles. Throughout her life Christina Rossetti was pursued by the thought of death. Many of her poems, especially her later poems, display her concerns about death. Her early poems show death as the destroyer of mortal things, reflecting her pessimism and her sometimes naturalistic views on life. Her death wish is sometimes associated with her thwarted desire for absolute love in the world. Her religious poems describe death as the gate to heaven or to hell, the final resting place from the pains of her life. Either as her religious yearning for a better place of Resurrection or as her way of expressing her unfulfilled desire in the world, her persistent theme of death is an expression of the conflict between a sometimes skeptical, sometimes religious view. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Chapter I. INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY......... ........ 1 II. JUVENILE POEMS AND CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES . 7 Christina's early pessimism and illness Influences of religion, society, and family tradition Juvenile poems of an unrequited love and death III. LOVE POEMS ..................... ......... 13 Christina's unfulfilled love life The theme of separation caused by death Death as the place to find an ideal love IV. THE EXPRESSION OF DESIRE FOR REST OR ESCAPE. 34 Christina's chronic illness Desire to rest or escape in death Death as an escape from loneliness or monotony V. DEATH AS AN EXPRESSION OF RELIGIOUS HOPE . 47 Christina's religious poems Death as a waiting place for the Resurrection. VI. CONCLUSION ........ .4.B . ..... 71 ENDNOTES....................... ............. .0. 75 WORKS CITED........... .. ....... 78 WORKS CONSULTED............... ................. 80 iii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY Many critics have focused on Christina Rossetti's religious devotion and on the elegant lyrical power of her poetry. Undoubtedly she was a devout Christian throughout her life; 1 besides, her deep religious feeling, represented in her poetry and prose, is similar to the feelings of many of her contemporaries.2 Eleanor Walter Thomas states that like many Victorian writers Christina Rossetti felt deeply and tried to accept "the God and the doctrines of Christianity as revealed in the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer and as interpreted by the Church of England" (192). Her life and works reveal her belief in all of those, "yet her poems show, too, that in the way of her attainment of the [Christian] certainty obtruded the conflict in her nature between her love of the human and the perishable and the Divine and eternal" (Thomas 196). Many critics express their doubts about her religious devotion because her tone in many poems reflects her lack of conviction in the existence of the other world. Many of Christina's poems, especially her later religious poems, express her praise of God and her hopeful expectation of heaven, where she believed she could be with God after death. Nevertheless, those poems are so frequently sad and 1 2 pessimistic that they seem to express a longing for the world of death rather than for the bliss and accomplishment of the present, materialistic world. Nesca Robb writes that "Christina is pursued, as she was all her days, by the thought of death" (84). Marya Zaturenska believes that Christina has been primarily "the poet of death, the poet of the death-wish"3 (229). According to Georgina Battiscombe, William Rossetti said of her that "she was compelled, even if not naturally disposed, to regard this world as a 'Valley of the shadow of death"' (8). Without a doubt, she was concerned with death; more than a hundred poems seem to display her views on death either directly or indirectly. In most of the poems on death, however, her vision of the other world or death wish is accompanied by her doubtful or reluctant tone. The poems on death, while manifesting Christina's pessimistic views on the world, seem to reflect her many conflicting ideas on thwarted dreams and desires. Most of her religious poems seem to depict her earnest desire to end her present life, waiting to be restored by Christ on Judgment Day. At certain moments of those poems her delightful mood of expectation turns out to be the sincere expression of her earnest belief. However, in many of those poems, the tone of hopeful expectations surprisingly mingles with sudden touches of melancholy and elegiac moods. In other instances of her poems on death, she writes from different motives than a religious one. She 3 was unhappy and in a doleful mood. She wished to be dead because of her unfulfilled dreams in the present world. Or she simply wanted to escape from her monotonous life, which lacked freshness and was contrary to her most passionate, enthusiastic nature. In a way, those poems of her thwarted desires and the theme of escape are more natural and unforced expressions of her mind than are her extremely religious poems. In some of her poems, her desire for sleep is linked with her death wish because she sought in death the place of rest.4 Christina has written her poems on death wish from various motives that do not always reflect her religious convictions of an afterlife. The discrepancy surrounding her various reasons for death wish can find its explanation in her biography as well as the social conditions of her time. One major element that could have caused her to concentrate on the idea of death can be found in her childhood experiences and in her family tradition. Margaret Sawtell states that Christina's childhood instruction in the Christian faith made her "evidently for some years accustomed . to the thought of dying young" (12). Lona Mosk Packer mentions that "the morbid strain" of her poetry, especially [her] early poetry, "can be attributed to her romantic heritage" (18). In addition, Christina was closely related to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood members whose works were "in the main romantic in such qualities as 4 melancholy, dwelling on death, mystical suggestion, . .. (Thomas 44). Some biographies also tell about Christina's various imaginative proclivities, especially about her way of getting satisfaction from her creation of a dream world. As Thomas describes, she was constantly "at home in a dream world" (138). Since her inspiration came mostly from her imagination, her ideas on death seemed to come from her- imagined situation. She sought "escape" in this imagined dream world, her imagination creating for herself a world "more tranquil than earth" (Thomas 190). The interpretation of her death wish as her wish to take off her physical body of earthly desire can find its validity in the various unsatisfactory situations of her life. She failed in her two romantic episodes. Since she was a deeply religious person, it is probable that her belief in God and the religious doctrine of her church caused her to renounce two famous suitors. Yet, however strong she felt the differences between these men and herself, the denial wounded her womanly pride and left "a staggering blow" on her mind as William Michael Rossetti says in his memoir. The disgrace and the sadness she suffered from the final loss of her womanly role inevitably became an element that led her to contemplate death as a way of escape.6 Furthermore, from her childhood on she was constantly 5 bothered by ill health. Her brother states that she "was an invalid, seeking at times the countenance of Death very close to her own" (Packer 21). She suffered after 1871 from Graves' disease, which caused the disfigurement of her body with such symptoms as "shaking hands, protruding eyeballs, . fearful brown skin, and . increased weight" (Zaturenska 184). She is said, from then on, to have become "more of a recluse than ever" with the loss of "feminine vanity" because of her illness. Christina's restricted life, forced upon her by her ill health and by the spirit and conditions of the Victorian century, made her escape to another world of imagination as is shown in her poetry. After all, the study of her life and character, especially of her unfulfilled yearnings, allows us to see that her vision of ideal happiness and truth could be most nearly satisfied by her "flight from the Finite to the Infinite," that is, in her quest for God and the world of death (Thomas 190). Since her life was a lonely struggle between her unfulfilled dreams and various obligations inculcated by her family's intellectual, religious tradition, her death wish was her wish to escape from her dull, joyless daily life. The poems on death suggest Christina's conflicting, inconsistent ideas on death. She desired and sought for her death in her poems from different motives, which never can be reduced to a simple formula. Her death wish was one way 6 of expressing her various human desires, whether religious or not. The various motives of her death wish will only explain how a delicate, sensitive mind of a poet can find a way to put both her hope and her discontent into one wish. CHAPTER 2 JUVENILE POEMS AND CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES In 1847 Christina Rossetti's grandfather printed her first volume of verses for private circulation. According to Geoffrey Rossetti the collection is said to list "sixty- six pages of verse, written between her eleventh and sixteenth years" (97).
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